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This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information in this weblog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Magic of NSLinguistic​Tagger

This evening one of my friends sent me the link of iA Writer’s video featuring their latest update to the app.

I was blown away by the syntax highlighter in edit mode, where it highlights words based on selection of parts of speech.

At first, I thought they are doing some sophisticated natural language processing, I’m not expert but supporting multiple languages sounds like a tedious/impossible job to do in an year, unless there is easy way.

Apple provides us NSLinguistic​Tagger class as part of the iOS 5 SDK, it allows us to split up natural language text and tag it with information. As per the documentation it can identify languages, scripts and stem forms of words!NSLinguistic​Tagger is quite easy to use.

We can start by creating the instance of NSLinguisticTagger with tag schemes for a language and bunch of NSLinguisticTaggerOptions, options are used to tell tagger to ignore words, white spaces, punctuations etc.